We haven’t even begun to unpack from our trip to the South, and I’m suffering the nastiest head cold this side of the Mississippi complete with green sinus goo only pregnant hormones could produce. My house is a disaster, I have no clean underwear, and I haven’t slept more than four hours in the last five days.

Solution? Adopt another dog, obviously.

Introducing: Baroness von Sadie Montgomery Armstrong. You can call her Sadie. We call her That Really Stupid Decision We Made Yesterday.

This is Sadie and Chuck testing out her wire crate we set up in the basement yesterday afternoon.

This is Chuck laying claim to Sadie’s crate. Isn’t he intimidating?

This is Sadie moments after she told Chuck where to shove it.

This is Sadie in a RARE moment of sitting still.

The story goes something like this: Sadie is a three year old house broken, crate-trained chocolate lab/golden retriever mix who has an exaggerated habit of crotch-sniffing and drooling all over everything. For the past several months she has been living in near squalor within a chain link cage in my sister’s backyard. It’s pretty safe to say that my sister, like everyone else in my family, is not a dog person. My family likes animals grilled or fried or roasted over an open pit, and think that having a furry animal snuggled at the end of the bed is a barbarous display of absolute nonsense.

Sadie was not my sister’s dog, but her husband’s brother’s dog, and in lieu of getting into the reasons why the dog was at her house and being neglected in the backyard, I’ll just say that all parties involved could be clinically diagnosed with passive-aggressive psychosis. The point is, Sadie was living a miserable life, getting her meals from one of those asinine self-feeding contraptions people use when they are too damn lazy to feed the dog themselves, sleeping in her own poop, and generally lacking any human contact whatsoever. The only people she saw on a daily basis were my sister’s two year old twin boys who didn’t know any better than to pelt her with water, stick their fingers up her nose, and coax her onto the trampoline where they would torture her further by playing Crack the Egg.

Yesterday I rescued Sadie from my sister’s house. She had called me last week before we left for Memphis and said that if we didn’t take the dog, she was going to take Sadie to the pound or wherever you take stinky dogs because she had had enough. I consulted Jon, and after about 12 seconds of deliberation we agreed to take her.

We’d been thinking about getting a second dog, and had come close several times in the past year, if only to ease Chuck’s transition into a different kind of life once the baby is born, a life where he is no longer the center of my attention. It hasn’t even been 24 hours, and Chuck is a total basket case. He does not understand why she is here, why her damn tail won’t stop wagging, or why she just won’t go away. The permanent worry wrinkle in the middle of his forehead is swollen to the point that it might explode. I keep waiting for him to assert the slightest hint of dominance, but he just sort of sits behind me staring at her like, “That is one big bitch.”

In addition to unpacking and the 10 loads of laundry that await me today, Sadie and I are going to start what is sure to be several weeks of intense training, including how to STAY and how to COME. The one we’re going to have the hardest time with is CALM THE FUCK DOWN. She already knows how to SIT and BE CUTE. I never thought I could love a second dog this much, but she is absolutely the sweetest thing on earth. She deserves every bit of love we have to offer, despite the drool and the constant thump, thump, thump of her gigantic, hairy tail. Perhaps because I’m pregnant, I cry every time I think about what she’s been through in the past several months. And then I cry about about all the shoes she’s going to chew in the next several months. God help us.

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